Oracle WebCenter is the user engagement platform for social business—connecting people and information.

Friday Jul 12, 2013

Today's guest post is by Calvin Scharffs, VP of Marketing and Product Development for the Oracle partner, Lingotek. Calvin is a dedicated executive with over 18 years of experience managing products, sales, marketing, operations and personnel. His experience ranges from work with a Fortune 500 company to small start-ups. For more information about Lingotek and Oracle WebCenter, please visit http://www.lingotek.com/oracle.

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“You need to increase sales for our company. You have one week to figure out how to do it. Next week, I want to see a plan that will work.” –Your CEO

As a CMO, chances are that you’ve seen a request like this. Armed with new IT tools like analytics, you have more resources at your fingertips than ever before. Yet the demands on you have grown proportionally. From finding new markets to building global product strategies, everything has to happen quickly and with an impressive ROI.

The Treasure Abroad

Some of the lowest-hanging fruit a marketer can find exist online. Global Internet users carry around $50 trillion in spending power, according to the Common Sense Advisory [1]. Global markets can fast-track the process of increasing your sales. The caveat? It probably won’t happen in English.

Websites in English will only reach about one-third of online consumers, and that number is shrinking. Seventy percent of global Web users visit websites in their own language [2]. A recent European Commission survey found that 90 percent of EU Internet users prefer to visit a site written in their own language [3]. Forty-two percent of users won’t buy anything from a website written in a language other than their own.

Reap Returns with Smart Content

Indeed, it takes 12 languages to reach 80 percent of online users. Understandably, it is relatively common for companies to publish websites in multiple languages. Thirty-five percent of companies have more than 10 websites, nearly 50 percent of which are published in over 5 languages, one CMS survey found [4].

But more isn’t always better in translation. Generally speaking, 13 languages will get your product in front of 90 percent of the economic opportunity online, Common Sense Advisory found. Every product and service is different, however, and the globalization strategy that works best for pickup trucks might not be the right one for mopeds. Moreover, every translation doubles the amount of content you must manage, update and edit. You don’t want to create a content (and budgetary) Frankenstein by pouring everything you have into translating it all.

Define Your ROI Metrics

Before you spend time and money on translation, you must find out which locations boast the most promising ROI. Let’s say you want to enter new markets where every $1 of translation will generate $10 of ROI. How do you decide which geographies to enter first?

Devise a cost-benefit analysis of your most promising prospective markets. That way, you can make more informed decisions and better justify your efforts. Study where your competitors have succeeded, and see how much it will cost you to get there. Study global trends in emerging markets, such as the BRICs and, beyond that, “Next-11” countries such as Indonesia, Egypt and Vietnam [5]. Will any of your products or services resonate in these promising overall markets? Is there a product you’d like to sell more of, and a geography that is especially in need of that product? Create a top five or top 10 list of regions that hold promise for entry.

Next, decide which content to translate first. This is where analytics really shine. Chances are, some metrics are more meaningful for your marketing organization than others. Maybe outside sales are your best funnel for returns. Think about which sales-related content you should translate. If your homepage and product catalogs tend to drive the most conversions, translate them before your other webpages. In the case that your middle-aged, middle-class demographic is your most lucrative market, translate the content that they frequent the most. Once you have your content translation A-list, it’s time to think about how to execute—within budget, and on deadline.

Have Lingotek analyze the costs for each project. Lingotek has a content value index that features three different types of translation: machine translation, crowdsourced translation and professional translation. Each is associated with different costs and benefits. Machine translation is the most cost-effective, but also sometimes the roughest, option. Crowdsourced translation is in the middle, and professional translation is best reserved for documents that are technical or require the expertise of a trained individual. You can have Lingotek analyze the costs of each type of translation for your content—before you actually translate it. You can make a more informed cost decision.

Move that content from your CMS into Lingotek. This is easily done within the CMS workflow. Start your translation project by machine-translating all of your content. Label your translation a work in progress to keep track of it.

Lingotek has a content value index that features three different types of translation workflows: machine translation, crowdsourced translation and professional translation. Each is associated with different costs and benefits. Machine translation is the most cost-effective, but also sometimes the roughest, option. Community translation, which harnesses the crowd for thorough results, is in the middle, and professional translation is best reserved for documents that are technical, geared at the most promising markets or otherwise require the expertise of a trained individual.

Lingotek Content Value Index

Refine Your Content Priorities

Once your content is machine translated—a cost-effective option that costs as little as $0.18 per word—Lingotek’s global Web experience management analytics will tell you which languages to prioritize for professional or crowdsourced translation. That is, which languages will offer you the greatest ROI, based on your content, if you up-level them to the best quality of translation and localization.

From inside of Lingotek, you can choose any combination of community and professional workflows, based on the recommendations you receive. The more sure-fire geographies should be professionally translated. For your riskier geographies, simply translate all of your content in the community workflow, and up-level it to professional as you gain more traction over time. Once your translations are complete, simply publish your content back into your CMS, in the same way that you would publish English content.

Watch Your Investment Grow

Let your translated content work its magic for two months. When you check back in, don’t be surprised if you see a 100-300 percent increase in your key ROI metrics, be they site traffic or email conversions.

Lingotek’s post-translation analytics will show you both language-level and page-level details about which content is providing the greatest return on your translation investment. You’ll gain a detailed understanding of which translated content is working best. That way, you can adapt your strategy to even better serve your customers in every key geography. Gauging the progress in your key metrics, you can quantify your sales increases against your Lingotek expenditures, including professional services, and calculate your ROI.

With a jump in sales proven, you might even enjoy an additional bonus and stock options of your own.

Wednesday Jul 10, 2013

Web site visitors have high expectations for the sites they visit. Increasingly, they expect to access your website and your content in their preferred language. Whether you serve a diverse local community or you compete in markets around the globe, the ability to engage your customers in their preferred language can mean the difference between business success and failure.

Engaging customers in their preferred language often means translating content from one language to another. Translation can be a complex and expensive process if not managed properly, so success implies having the tools to manage and deliver not only the various finished translated content, but also to manage the process of content translation.

With Oracle WebCenter Sites, organizations are empowered to translate and deliver their web presence into appropriate languages – as much or as little as needed. Granular control enables marketing to manage translation costs: translate a single article, a page or an entire site, as well as control of when to translate, and who or what service to use for each translation. The same business interface provided for content creation and contribution allows you to easily manage multilingual content as well as the translation processes. Simple click-to-translate and seamless integration with third party automated, crowd-sourced, and expert translation services provide an easy-to-use but deep integration of the translation process into site management.

You can now easily extend your web presence to new geographies, locales or demographics, and effectively deliver multilingual marketing and customer experience initiatives in customers’ preferred languages, while saving significant time, effort and cost in managing multilingual sites. Furthermore, you can provide multichannel, multilingual online campaigns as the translated content works with WebCenter Sites full multichannel and multiple device delivery capabilities for multilingual experiences across thousands of devices – including smart phones and tablets. WebCenter Sites capabilities include:

Monday Jul 08, 2013

To succeed
in an increasingly global marketplace, organizations must successfully engage
with their customers in relevant ways. This includes delivering a digital
customer experience that takes your customers’ cultural and language
preferences into account. Following are seven reasons why you may want to
make localizing your digital customer experience a priority:

#1 – Localization Paves the Way for Sales
and Profits

Localized
marketing is acknowledged as essential for business growth and profitability
but according to a CMO Council Study, 50% of marketers say they are underperforming
in this area leaving much room for improvement.

#2 – Localization Leads to Greater Customer
Engagement

According to
this same CMO Council Study, localized marketing strategies and programs result
in greater customer relevance, response and return, better customer
conversations and connectivity, and improved loyalty and advocacy.

#3 – People Prefer to Purchase in Their Own
Language

According to
a Common Sense Advisory Group study, more than half of consumers surveyed
indicated that they only buy on websites where information is made available to
them in their language.

#4 – Language Influences Important
Purchases Heavily

The same study
revealed that language influences important purchasing decisions more heavily
than less important purchases.For
example, over 85% of respondents felt that having information available in
their language was critical when evaluating insurance or other financial
services.

#5 – The Internet is No Longer Dominated by
English

It’s true
that English speakers make up the largest percentage of internet users, but that
percentage is less than 30%. Rounding out the top ten languages used on the web
are Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian and
Korean.

#6 – Localization Isn’t Just for the Large
Multinational Conglomerate

Localization
is not just the province of large-scale global corporations that compete in
many regional markets in many different languages.Even regional companies serving a diverse
customer base can create value and improve the digital customer experience by
providing digital content in users’ preferred languages.

#7 – Investments in Localization Have
Strong ROI

The
investments that organizations make in localization can pay strong
dividends.According to a paper put out
by the Localization Industry Standards Association, $25 was returned for every
$1 invested in localization.

About

Oracle WebCenter is the center of engagement for business—powering
exceptional experiences for customers, partners, and employees. It connects
people, process, and information with the most complete portfolio of portal,
Web experience management, content, imaging and collaboration technologies.